


Mask Of Blood

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, The Demon (DCU Comics)
Genre: Angst, Crack Treated Seriously, Dramatic Irony, Dramatic entrances, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hair, Identity Reveal, Illusions, Immortality, Portals, Reunions, Rhyming, but i am totally okay with King Arthur being fact, closed time loop, sometimes DC's Bad History annoys me, strange versions of grief, working title: 'one jason limit'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-11-28 10:18:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20964923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: “Jason!” Batman had shouted, arm desperately outstretched as if to catch what was no longer there. He’d sounded wrenched apart. As though having experience losing this one of his several sons made no difference at all to the shock and pain of it, or even made it worse.Blood hadn’t been the one he meant by that name. So he’d stayed silent.





	Mask Of Blood

**Author's Note:**

> This exists because first my sisters got the idea that Jason's white-forelock and red hair designs had canonically been fused into one look, and I was like "no that's a different Jason."
> 
> And then audreycritter encouraged me, thank you audrey. 😄

Batman clearly hadn’t slept in days. The cowl was pushed back, crumpled and vaguely grubby. Shadows cut deep into his face, and his eyes were rimmed-red. It had gone past the point where weariness betrayed his humanity to the viewer, and instead leant him a ghoulish look.

They’d seen him like this before, pushed to anyone else’s breaking point and beyond, but rarely ever this unguarded. Jason Blood and Etrigan were an entity the Batman kept his guard up around. They were magic, and unpredictable, and their morals were none too reliable, and he needed as perfect a façade in the face of all these things as could be achieved.

Not that it had ever made much difference, but he couldn’t know that.

If he’d known he wasn’t alone in the Batcave, even here Batman wouldn’t have let the wear show.

…he’d probably have changed his costume to one with fewer mustard stains on the tights, too. At least he was eating.

It wasn’t a case, this time, that he was pushing himself for. Not really. It was the disappearance of one Jason Peter Todd.

Jason Blood (with Etrigan providing silent, rhyming acid commentary) had been there at the old Potter’s Field outside the city three nights ago, to see the portal open in midair, in the midst of a tense showdown. Watched it swallow the Red Hood. And close.

_“Jason!”_ Batman had shouted, arm desperately outstretched as if to catch what was no longer there. He’d sounded wrenched apart. As though having _experience_ losing this one of his several sons made no difference at all to the shock and pain of it, or even made it worse.

Blood hadn’t been the one he meant by that name. So he’d stayed silent. He’d remained in the shadows, and then slipped away.

Checked his messages two days later to find Batman had tried seven times to contact him.

It had been…gratifying, actually. Especially once he confirmed that the reason was, in fact, to consult him for his expertise on magical portals.

The machine Batman had been carefully calibrating since he arrived tonight sparked abruptly, and lost power. “No!” Batman tore the casing open and began poking at internal wiring, without disconnecting the power source, which as even people from the sixth century CE knew was an _excellent_ way to stupidly kill yourself.

As good an entrance cue as any.

“It won’t work,” Jason said, and stepped from his hiding place, mystic veils scattering.

Batman’s head snapped around. There was no instant of alarm; there was one of menace, but it passed as soon as he recognized the intruder. “Blood,” he said, a tone of curt greeting. Withdrew his tweezers from the guts of the device, lowering his immediate odds of sudden death by at least fifty percent. “Excellent, I’ve been trying to reach you for days—tell me what _will_ work, then,” he added, processing Jason’s words several seconds late.

** _The man of bats I dare well say / has had no rest by night or day / or else his brains just rot away!_ **

Jason ignored Etrigan’s commentary with the ease of long, long practice. He shook his head. “You aren’t going to be able to get him back from when he’s gone away to.”

Batman’s face darkened, enough that he was more intimidating than he could ever have been with the mask on—from Jason’s perspective at least; that of someone who was fully aware of the man’s fragile mortality. Gotham’s underbelly might disagree. “I think you’ll find I have sufficient experience with time displacement to make that sort of judgment for myself. If you don’t plan to be helpful you can see yourself out.”

He turned his attention resolutely back to the machine, which was putting out halfhearted sparks again.

Jason almost went. Let that be the end of it. So what if the Dark Knight _did_ electrocute himself, and end this farce on the note it deserved.

But no, he didn’t, he didn’t even come close to leaving; Etrigan laughed at him for the weak lie. “You can’t rescue him, Bruce,” he said, and it was—gentle, almost, kinder than he’d found it easy to be in a long, long time. “Because…”

A long, slow breath. The plunge. “Because I already made it back here the slow way.”

Batman went still as a murdered thing, and then looked up. “You…” he said, slow with disbelief and hope and fear and horror and joy and exhaustion, his eyes hunting the planes of the accursed knight’s ever-youthful face.

Jason let out his breath, and let the glamor shred. It was a light, minor one, very little work to keep up; he’d been wearing it for decades. Just enough to sharpen his cheekbones and his chin, blunt the end of his nose, change the curve of his eyelids and the weight of his mouth.

His hair stayed red. It had been red for a long, long time, a lie turned truth. _Dyed by blood,_ Merlin had said, before he died. The star of white above his brow had been the same all along. Since death had given him up the first time.

“You,” whispered Bruce, all pain. It was so much like another night, over a thousand years ago, when Jason had dropped mask before this man on a rooftop.

But it was different, too, because it wasn’t fond memories of the dead stripped away from Batman now but the hope of staging a rescue, of regaining the lost child with whom he’d only just begun to build a lasting peace. And because he stared not with the blow of a dark suspicion confirmed but with complete, blindsided shock. “All along?”

There was so much pain in the way he asked it, it almost drowned out all else.

All Jason’s pain had worn out a long time ago.

Etrigan laughed at him again. Jason ignored him.

“Hey Bruce,” he said, and smiled, crooked and warm and raw, Gotham running up into his voice, nothing like anyone expected from Jason of the Blood.

He’d lost the accent, of course. A long time ago. It had worn away. It hadn’t even taken a century. He’d forgotten exactly how it even _should_ sound, until he was able to listen to it again. And even then, even long slipped away and lost from his own tongue, it had sounded like home.

_Why Gotham?_ people had asked sometimes, ever since he relocated here in 1806. Vandal Savage had asked, not caring about the answer. Constantine had asked. _Batman_ had asked, once, possessive. I like the atmosphere, Jason had shrugged, because he had no intention of telling any of them his real reasons.

Once the city had started to look familiar, he’d lurked in the Narrows and the Cauldron, listening to the children play, just to learn the rhythm again, so he’d have it if he wanted it. Etrigan had made fun of him, but he didn’t have so many pieces of himself left that he was willing to let one pass, if he could pick it up again.

He’d kept to Jason Blood’s trim, careful diction anyway. Played his part. In spite of his lack of any efforts at all to conserve the timeline, everything was the same when his original lifetime rolled around again. After so long, he knew inevitability when he saw it.

“_Jason._”

The voice dragged him back into the moment, where Bruce had vaulted the table in a single easy motion that belied his exhaustion and now flung his arms around the immortal trespassing in his Batcave before Jason had time to judge the emotion in his voice.

Because the details didn’t matter, it seemed, when the son you’d feared you might never see again walked calmly back into your life. Even if he was fifteen hundred years older than the last time you’d seen him.

(Jason was old enough, now, that he could accept that duffel bags full of heads were not actually _details_. But apparently to Bruce, at a moment like this, everything became only a detail, and he was amazed he’d never understood, as a youth, that men whose coldness was not feigned were nothing like _this_ man at all. He’d understood that much as a child. Children were oddly knowing sometimes.)

When it happened, his displacement, before he’d even started working his way toward Camelot, Jason had hoped at first for rescue. Counted on it, even, the first day or two.

Eventually, he’d started wondering if they’d even tried. _Whoops, magic portal, all in a day’s work. Jason’s probably fine, right? He’ll figure something out. He’s not even dead this time_. The first horse he’d stolen in Northumbria had been subjected to several diatribes on the theme.

By the time Merlin’s curse had trapped him into a story he’d already known, forever passing through time the slow way with an enemy laughing inside his head, he’d already been resigned to it. It had been _over a thousand years._

And yet it healed something he’d long stopped noticing was broken, to find the man who’d adopted him so long ago here, at the start, so utterly desperate for his rescue.

…and he found it broke something he’d never realized was still whole, to know his loss had shattered Batman twice; to know there really _had_ been a home to go back to, in spite of all he’d convinced himself of in those distant days, before offering his trained sword-arm to King Arthur. And that once again, the child Batman had lost could never come home. Because he didn’t exist anymore.

Batman was a fragile mortal thing in his arms, and Etrigan for once had the decency to shut up.

“Sorry,” Jason said, and that seemed to break the spell enough that Bruce stopped just hugging him and stepped back to half of arm’s length, keeping a firm hold on one of his elbows and reaching up to run a thumb over Jason’s cheekbone, as though testing it for reality.

“It was really you?” he asked. “All along?”

He’d known Jason Blood since his late teens, though never very well. They’d never been on particularly good terms. Jason hadn’t been able to…bear it. Risk it. Something. He’d needed his distance. It had been so long since it was half this hard not to meddle.

Also, young Bruce was annoying and had needed putting in his place. It wasn’t like Jason _hadn’t_ taught him useful things about how to fight against magic, _eventually_. Usually, he could admit, through object lessons.

That had been a highly cathartic period, really.

“Sorry,” said Jason again, a little more cheerfully at the memory of giving 17-year-old Batman a hard time.

He watched Bruce remember just how old Jason Blood was known to be, and how _much_ that meant Jason had lived through.

Batman’s hand came up over his temple into the red of his hair. “Jason,” he said.

“Jason of the Blood,” Jason affirmed. “Jason the Red.” Accursed. Betrayer. Warlock. Someone who regretted and regretted and never, ever apologized. “It’s—look, it’s Merlin’s fault, but as usual I rather deserved it.” He frowned, because he’d heard his own dialect slip, there, out of the carefully relearned patterns of Jason Todd of Gotham, and it was very obvious so had Bruce.

Jason took a step back, slipping free of Batman’s grip. His studied calm was starting to abandon him, and he could no longer bear to be touched. (Bruce didn’t fight to keep hold of him. He was grateful for the understanding and respect, at the same time something ancient and tiny and cracked and very young at the bottom of his soul keened and raged and hissed at being given up.) “I missed you,” he told the man who had been his father, because he deserved to know that. “Over a thousand years, and you were one of the things I never stopped missing.”

Even when he couldn’t remember—and there had been significant stretches of being unable to remember, both by mischance and on purpose to spare himself the weight of all that time, or in exchange for Etrigan’s silence. Even then, he’d felt the ache of _missing_, of having a place he’d once belonged and not being there. Arthur had come close, for a while, before it all fell apart, but…

“There’s no way to spare you that, Jay-lad?” Bruce asked, the old nickname grown beyond absurd with the current difference in their ages. “No way to bring you home? You’re sure.”

“Sorry, Bruce.” He wished. “Even if Merlin hadn’t trapped me, we’re in a stable time-loop now. Pulling me out of it could rupture time and space.”

“Hrm.” From the set of Batman’s jaw, space, time, and Merlin were all subject to being hung upside down by an ankle and menaced until they changed their minds. From the slightly unfocused look of his eyes, he was going to collapse any minute now.

Batman squinted, fighting his own eyeballs to scour Jason’s face for something, some truth that might unlock a hidden solution, some hint of a new deception, _something_. Jason let his face stay dry and cool, smooth as marble. He wondered if Bruce was looking for nothing more complex than traces of the boy he’d known.

That swagger he’d perfected back in the day had been only another mask. He wondered if Bruce thought Jason Blood was that as well. A gauze easily brushed aside. But he had been Jason of the Blood for lifetimes, and Jason Todd was so long ago and far away.

Jason took another step back, and Bruce frowned. “Where are you going? Jason. _Stop._”

In no lifetime had he liked commands, and only for a few years of his very first had he accepted them from this voice, and yet he hesitated. “Whatever for?” he asked. “I only came to make sure you didn’t kill yourself trying to retrieve something past recovering.”

“Well, for one thing, if you disappear again absolutely no one is going to believe me.” Batman paused. “_I_ may not believe myself, when I wake up. I’m badly compromised at the moment.”

“You want me to stay around for verification.” He didn’t want to. He could feel his willpower disintegrating.

Etrigan was laughing.

“Dick’s been blaming himself,” Bruce told him, carefully motionless, as though Jason was a wild bird he feared to scare off. “Tim’s been pulling all his contacts and verging on distraught. Damian’s been working himself to exhaustion trying to keep your turf clean for when you come back.”

His _brothers_. Hah. They were phantoms to him, even having seen and spoken to each of them again a least once within the last decade. Batman might as well have invoked the names of Gawain and Lancelot.

…but if Gawain and Lancelot had been alive, and in the next room or a nearby castle to be conjured with, that probably would have worked.

** _The fledgling with wings clipped away / back to the nest it longs to stray / as if its claws were only grey._ **

Shut _up_, Jason thought viciously. Days when Etrigan decided to rhyme everything on a single syllable were particularly hard on the nerves.

“Please,” said Bruce, the pause having evidently stretched on long enough he’d given up on a clear answer. “Stay.”

Jason shook his head. “I’ll meet you in the study at eleven in the morning,” he said, taking another step back. “Get some rest.” And he stepped back through another portal, this one of his own practiced summoning, and was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Blood gets amnesia and new retcons so much I could probably have written this to be strictly compliant with his canon, via a new bullshit twist, but I can't _imagine_ why I'd want to. Everyone seems to agree the Knight of the Round Table backstory is the good one.


End file.
